The Latest: More Reasons Why You Should Be Testing IG Stories and Pinterest Ads

Aug. 06, 2018 //
Jeff Cracolici

Last week, Instagram’s Stories feature turned two years old, a popular Twitter-to-Facebook setting no longer is operational for individuals and businesses, and Pinterest profiles four types of holiday shoppers who use their platform. For marketers, the popularity of Instagram’s Stories and Pinterest should really start to drive interest in integrating both into their upcoming marketing mix.

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Instagram Stories Two Years On [Infographic]

Instagram’s Snapchat-inspired feature, Stories, turned two years old last week. The following infographic was released by Instagram to detail the rapid growth.

Our Take

The adoption rate of Stories has really taken over the image-sharing app. As we brought up last week, Facebook expects the number of Stories posted to the app will soon exceed the number of images posted to the traditional news feed. This said, marketers who feel their audience is on Instagram should really be testing “Stories Ads” as soon as possible. Not only are these ads located in a spot of high activity, they are prominently featured on a user’s smartphone without the clutter of other information. By integrating this ad type into your digital marketing mix, you are ensuring that budgets will be spent, and ads will be served in a high-quality placement.

PSA: Cross-Posting Tweets To Facebook No Longer Works As Of Today

Due to more strict API specifications on Facebook’s side, individuals and businesses can no longer set Tweets to automatically post to Facebook within Twitter’s environment. This change was effective as of August 1st.

Our Take

If your business has been using this Twitter feature, there are plenty of third-party solutions out there that can replace this functionality (we recommend Hootsuite). However, many social media experts stress the importance of customizing each post specifically for that channel. For example, what you write on Twitter normally translates to poor engagement on Facebook or LinkedIn. Taking the time to write different posts for each channel – only if it’s slightly different – will pay off in the long run.

Pinterest Profiled 4 Types Of Holiday Shoppers

Pinterest profiled their users into four types of holiday shopper: guest, gifter, planner or time-saver. Each shopper profile is coupled with some behavior traits, top categories of interest, and how you can target each category on Pinterest’s advertising platform.

Our Take

The most important takeaway from this piece is that 67% of Pinners, as the Pinterest audience is called, are set to spend over $250 this holiday season. It is definitely worth the due diligence to see if Pinterest is worth integrating into your holiday marketing plan. It has been well-documented that many Pinterest users leverage the platform in the research phase of the buying process, so it is important to test these ahead of the holiday shopping season.